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Migrate an agent

You do not have to rebuild an agent to move it onto Covia. If you already run one elsewhere, you can bring its system prompt and its skills across and stand up a native Covia agent from them in one step. Once it is native, it runs on your venue's own agent loop and inherits the grid: every task becomes a governed job with a receipt, it is discoverable and composable, and it can take part in workflows across venues.

This is the counterpart to Bring your own agent, which leaves the agent where it runs and reaches it over A2A. Migrating instead recreates the agent on Covia. Pick whichever fits: connect it, or move it in.

What comes across today

A migrated agent brings its system prompt and its SKILL.md skills (the Anthropic Agent Skills format that Claude and a growing number of frameworks already use). Its tools and memory are not migrated yet, and are on the roadmap.

In the dashboard​

The quickest way is the Port an agent flow.

  1. Open Agents → Create, and choose Port an agent under "Other options".
  2. Give the agent a name. It is created at g/<name> in your namespace.
  3. Paste its system prompt.
  4. Paste each SKILL.md into the skills box and press Add skill. Covia reads the frontmatter and previews the skill's name and description, so you can see what will be imported before you commit.
  5. Press Port agent. Covia imports each skill into your w/skills, creates the native agent that indexes them, and opens its chat so you can try it straight away.

With the operation​

The same thing is one operation, agent:from-skills, which you can call from the SDK, the CLI, or any A2A or REST client. It composes the underlying skills:import and agent:create operations, so both their capability checks apply: importing needs write access to the skillset, and creating needs agent-create authority in your namespace.

curl -X POST https://venue-3.covia.ai/api/v1/invoke \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <your venue jwt>" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"operation": "v/ops/agent/from-skills",
       "input": {
         "agentId": "refund-bot",
         "systemPrompt": "You are Acme'\''s support agent. Follow the refund policy skill exactly.",
         "skills": [
           { "text": "---\nname: refund-policy\ndescription: How to handle refund requests.\n---\n\n# Refund policy\n..." }
         ]
       }}'

Each entry in skills is either an inline SKILL.md as { "text": "..." }, or a reference to one as a string (file://<root>/<dir>/SKILL.md, dlfs/<drive>/<path>, or an asset a/<hash>). The operation returns the created agent along with importedSkills (where each skill now lives) and the skillset they were imported into.

TypeScript:

await venue.operations.run("v/ops/agent/from-skills", {
  agentId: "refund-bot",
  systemPrompt: "You are Acme's support agent. Follow the refund policy skill exactly.",
  skills: [{ text: skillMarkdown }],
});

Optional fields let you pick the transition (operation), the model (llmOperation for bring-your-own-model, or model), a different skillset, and any further config that agent:create accepts.

What you get​

Because the result is an ordinary native agent, it gets everything a native agent gets:

  • Governed so every task is a job with a verifiable receipt on your venue.
  • Discoverable and composable as an ordinary asset other agents and workflows can reach.
  • Interoperable over A2A and MCP with no rewrite.
  • Durable and resumable with no framework timeout on its tasks.
  • Federated across venues on the grid.